if you think for even just a second how fucking crazy bonkers it is that women are so frequently kept from being protagonists or important or fully realized characters when its like. That is literally 50% of the world population. Half of all people (more or less. hopefully more as time marches on!) are women. And you look at media and think about how many protagonists are men and their best friends are men and the ensemble cast is 80-100% men and the fandoms are about men and the romances are about men. well. YOU GO INSANE
this is your gentle reminder to stop fighting against your adhd and instead structure your life around it
buy a pack of chapsticks and put one in the pocket of all of your coats and jackets because you always forget to bring one and chapped lips is sensory hell
leave important things where you can see them. if they go in a box or a drawer you will forget they exist
put any appointments or deadlines in your phone calendar As Soon As you get them. set a reminder for a week before, a day before, an hour before, as many as you need as often as you need them.
when that little voice in your head says "i dont need to write that down, ill remember it" that is the devil talking!!! write it down anyway!!
plan for down time. have a few hours at the end of every day to just do fun stuff like engage in your hyperfixations. even if you didnt get all of your work done that day, have the rest anyway. you probably spent the whole day beating yourself up for not doing what you Should be doing, so you still need the break.
if you never eat vegetables because its too much effort to chop and cook them, get the frozen or canned shit. it doesnt go off for ages and you just have to microwave it. theres no point buying fresh vegetables if they just keep going off and being left to rot in the bottom of your fridge
if you struggle to decide what to have for dinner every day, take the decision out of it. choose a set of meals and eat those on rotation until you get sick of them, then choose some new ones and do it again.
its not stupid if it works! our brains literally have a chemical deficiency. you are allowed to accommodate yourself. go forth and stop making your life more difficult than it has to be because "this shouldn't be this hard". it is hard, so make it easier.
The data engineer started as a casual reader of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Then he became obsessed, and built the most extensive network gra
In February, a user named EricKeller2 posted on Reddit. āI mapped every connection in the Epstein files,ā he wrote. He had built a website and database of more than 1.5 million files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. A giant interactive network graph showed the connections between 1,000-plus people in Epsteinās social worldāthrough flight manifests, email exchanges, and other documents that connect them. The post included a link to the site: Epsteinexposed.com.
That post got 5.5 million views. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world visited the site in the days that followed. And EricKeller2 was busier than ever.
EricKeller2ās real name isnāt Eric Keller. He used a pseudonym to protect himself and his family from Jeffrey Epsteinās rich and powerful friends. A thirtysomething data engineer with a wife and kids, heād been following the child sexual abuse case for yearsāreading court filings, depositions, materials from the Giuffre v. Maxwell case. But in the fall of 2025, as the initial deadline from the Epstein Files Transparency Act approached, he got more organized. And then he got obsessed.
Every day since then, Keller has been doggedly loading hundreds and hundreds of files into his database. Epstein Exposed contains material from many sources beyond the US Department of Justiceās file dump, including unsealed court records and FBI tips, and it focuses on exposing āthe connective tissue,ā as Keller put it, between the files. The site calls itself āthe most comprehensive searchable database of every person, document, flight, and connection in the Epstein files.ā
āThere were nights I had to stop,ā he tells me. āThere are descriptions of things no human being should have experienced.ā He remembers one 2017 email thread between Epstein and an intermediary, in which Epstein offers $300 to a girl for a topless massage. The intermediary tells him that the girl wasnāt available because she had school on Monday. Epstein then ups the offer to $400.
āYou can build a mental wall between yourself and what youāre reading, but it doesnāt always hold up,ā he adds. āSome nights it doesnāt hold at all.ā
He has a personal reason for pouring himself into this project. āI am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse,ā he tells me. Itās why he canāt seem to look away from the horror inside those files. And so he builds.
The Epstein Library on the Justice Departmentās website is a model of disorganization. In early December, Keller was clicking through the tens of thousands of pages of documents in the library and feeling āfrustrated disbeliefā at the chaosāfiles that could be hundreds of pages long, text that was sometimes blurry or sideways, a wire transfer with no context, an email chain with half the names blacked out, a flight log with only initials. āItās disorienting,ā he says. āYouāre reading fragments of something enormous and trying to figure out which fragments matter and how they connect.ā
One night, he spent about four hours trying to trace a single personās name across some 30 documents in the archive. āI just stopped and thought, I am doing by hand what a database could do in milliseconds,ā he says. As a builder of database infrastructure at a midsize company, he knew exactly what to do next. āI opened a code editor and started building. By 3 am I had a basic search prototype working against a few hundred documents,ā he says.
Around that time, a site called Jmail.world was making a splash as a tool for people to peruse Epsteinās emails as if using a Gmail interface. Launched in mid-November and built by a group of tech-savvy volunteers, it has since grown to include, among other things, his photos, flights, and Amazon purchase history, also displayed as if the reader is viewing Epsteinās own accounts. Keller used the tool and liked it. āJmail was proof that the community could build better tools than the government was providing,ā he told me.
It also helped him hone his own project. āInstead of thinking about one category of documents, I started thinking about the network,ā he says. āHow do you connect a person who appears in an email to a flight they were on, to a wire transfer, to a deposition they gave? That cross-referencing problem is what I wanted to solve.ā
Then, on December 19, the Justice Department released its first big tranche, adding hundreds of thousands of new documents to the existing archive. Immediately, Kellerās workload ballooned to an all-time high. The prototype he had built earlier in the month became the foundation for processing all of it.
Most nights he worked until 3 or 4 am, sipping cold coffee while navigating a sea of open tabs.
Because of his childhood, he says, āwhen the first documents started dropping, I couldnāt look away. I understood at a gut level what was being described in those files.ā In the evenings, heād return home from his day job and, once everyone in his family was in bed, heād hole up in his home office and spend hours scrolling through downloaded PDFs.
Many documents were posted as images, and heād run each page through layers of software to convert them into searchable textāsometimes one system would fail to convert the text and heād run it through a second or third. Then heād use another system to extract important details such as names, organizations, dates, and locations. Heād perform hash verificationāa process that checks whether the Justice Departmentās files have been tampered withāand redaction analysis, to scan for inconsistencies in how the government blacked out information. He tracked all his work in a meticulous, digital, color-coded ledger. āItās not uploading files,ā he says. āItās rebuilding a crime scene from 2 million fragments of evidence.ā
At the end of January, the DOJ dropped an even bigger tranche, this one containing more than 3 million files. Although the workload swelled even more overnight, Keller says the file drop was validating. After all, the entire system heād been building had been designed for that moment.
On February 5, Keller registered his domain. A week later, the number of files in his database had crossed a million. Heād also set up the first version of a colorful, interactive network graph that showed the connections between the powerful figures orbiting Epsteināfinanciers, politicians, academics, royalty. He decided he was ready to share it with the world, and he turned to Reddit.
With the sudden influx of visitors, the site needed constant attention. At one point it crashed in the middle of the night; Keller got it stable by dawn only to have it crash again that afternoon.
A former investigator messaged him, wanting to cross-reference a specific set of Deutsche Bank wire transfers against flight dates to see if money had moved on the same days that people had flown. A journalist from a major European outlet was using the site to investigate connections between Epsteinās financial network and someone in their country, and wanted help finding every document that mentioned certain company names. A forensic accountant specializing in financial crime reached out, offering to review a pattern of wire transfers that Kellerās site had surfaced; that person said that certain transaction patterns were consistent with layering techniques used in money laundering. āThe response tells you something specific,ā Keller said. āThere is a real community of people who have been trying to get to the truth here for a long time, and the site gave them something they did not have before.ā
The site kept crashing, and he was rewriting infrastructure deep into the night. In the mornings, heād stagger into his day job and pretend that everything was normal. What fueled him was anger, he saysāa sense that the DOJ had made the files practically unsearchable and that the public deserved better.
Twelve days after the launch of Epstein Exposed, Keller quit his job. On Reddit and through his siteās contact email, people were asking him how they could contribute, so he set up a donation page. āWhen I looked at what had come in, and what the site had become, it was clear that this was now the work.ā
Even committing himself full-time to the site, heās stretched thin. He forgets to eat, he says, unless his wife puts food in front of him. His back hurts. His eyes are constantly tired. He drinks too much coffee. Some mornings he forgets what day it is or when he last went outside. āMy wife jokes that when this chapter is over I owe her about three months of normal,ā he says.
Heās also under legal pressure. He has received formal demand letters from law firms representing individuals in the database. The letters arrive with 24-hour deadlines. āSome are on behalf of genuine victims, and I take those seriously,ā he says. āIāve redacted dozens of documents for verified survivors. But not all of them check out.ā
Keller says the files force him to reflect on his own childhood trauma. āWhen Iām reading through testimony or looking at records of what was done to these girls and young women, Iām not seeing strangers. Iām seeing something I understand from the inside,ā he says. Sometimes the emails stop him cold. In one from March 2014, someone writes to Epstein: āThank you for a fun night. Your littlest girl was a little naughty.ā Or thereās the email from 2017, in which someone tells Epstein they met a girl whoās ālike Lolita from Nabokov, femme miniature,ā and asks if they should send him āher type of candidates only.ā
āTheyāre referencing a novel about a man raping a 12-year-old,ā Keller says. āAs scouting criterion. In an email.ā
Keller canāt help but think about his own kids too. āThere are moments where that connection hits you, and you have to stop and just sit with it. Itās part of what makes it hard to walk away at the end of the night.ā
Scroll through the hundreds of replies to Kellerās launch post on Reddit and youāll notice a recurring sentiment: Heās building the infrastructure that the government should have set up in the first place.
For some time now, online communities have been helping to fill holes left by institutions. Reddit in particular has stood out. Last month, when the DOJ gave lawmakers a strict window in which to peek at the unredacted Epstein files, many members of Congress felt overwhelmed. Congressman Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida, knew he needed to ābe strategic and act fast.ā
āOn Reddit, there was an active community (r/Epstein) crowdsourcing information and digging into the details, so we posted there to gather direct links to the DOJās website and better understand what to prioritize,ā Frost told me. āMillions of people interacted with that post, which made clear that the American people want answers.ā
As Keller sees it, the online communityās role in the Epstein saga is, primarily, to refuse to let the issue dieāto spur new prosecutions and to help the victims see justice. āI think about them constantly,ā he says of the survivors. āIf they can come to this site and search and find documentation that confirms yes, this happened, yes, it was real, yes, the world knows,ā he said, āthat matters in a way I donāt have adequate language for.ā
Since quitting his job, Keller has found himself burning through his savings faster than he expected. He says he spends roughly $3,500 a month to keep the server running, and some weeks the donations donāt cover it. But he says his wife understands why this matters to him and has been supportive. The database has now indexed 2.15 million documents, cataloged 1,500 people, and mapped tens of thousands of Epsteinās connections. āYou donāt walk away from that,ā he said. āImagine where this can be in six months or a year from now. I believe this will make a difference. I have to. These things cannot be allowed to stand.ā
Traffic to his site remains high for now, but Keller says he isnāt obsessed with those numbers. āEven if the traffic drops to 10 people a day, those 10 people might include a journalist working on a lead, a researcher writing a paper, or a survivor looking for their own name in the record. Thatās enough,ā he says.
The work is far from over. He recently finished building out a forensic finance system. More than 130,000 documents still need to have their text made fully machine-readable. Hash verification is only 64 percent complete.
Not to mention, community members are still submitting names and researchers are still flagging new connections between documents. Itās why he doesnāt think this project has a finish line. So for now, Eric Keller will do what heās been doing for months: sit down at his monitor, sip some stale coffee, and get back to work.
btw this is not a universally agreed upon "symptom" of ADHD and I think many people would benefit from treating it as part & parcel of ADHD's broad, foundational trait: inability to do emotional regulation. A feeling of total rejection and terror at failure is a treatable and manageable issue. For me, I found it easier to manage once recognized that the reason I was having these reactions is that like many other emotional states, I couldn't "exit" an emotional state related to feelings of rejection once I was in it.
imo way too many people are going through life thinking they're just going to be sensitive to rejection for life because of how some people (not OP, but definitely plenty of ADHD influencers) talk about this "symptom." I don't think it's terribly productive that it gets constantly cordoned off as its own thing. like a lot of ADHD, while it sucks to have it shape your life up to the point you realize what it is, it is indeed possible to exposure therapy & DBT your way out of it.
signed: someone with ADHD who used to not be able to take critical feedback from anyone every and is now a freelancer and gets critical feedback three times before breakfast. still workin on it but it's very possible to go from "whiny crybaby disorder" to "mostly functional, if slightly sensitive ADHD adult"
I also think it's worth noting that rejection sensitive dysphoria is most parsimoniously interpreted as a trauma reactionāa learned response to a potential signals of social relationship deteriorating for reasons the ADHD person can't necessarily control. Social relationships are incredibly important to humans, and ADHD (especially undiagnosed and undisclosed) really sets us up to fail. This is especially true given that perceived social blame for stressful situations is a massive factor in transmuting stressful experiences into lasting trauma, and ADHDers are typically judged to be personally responsible for the failures that happen as a result of attentional, time awareness, or memory failures.
What conceptualizing RSD as a category of trauma response to social triggers does is allow us to treat it like any other trauma response. It pulls RSD out of the bioessentialist framework and into the realm of injuries that can be treated, learned associations that can be unlearned. It turns out that the same techniques that help with PTSD triggers, including the same damn meds (hi, clonidine), are effective for helping reduce RSD. (It also explains why RSD is also common in autistic people, who often have a similar history of social error and narratives of self blame, without requiring inherent neurological differences.)
It's a common kind of stress injury, basically. It's not Whiny Crybaby Disorder; it's more like shin splints. Getting better shoes for running, being careful about the ground you run on, and letting the splints heal properly can all help make shin splints go away when you've been running barefoot on concrete roads your whole life.
We here at Tumblr have noticed everyone has very strong feelings about every post on this site being changed to a picture of Lex Luthor from The CW's Smallville with the words "Lex Get Bald Tonight" over it. To this we say: we're listening. we hear you. and we couldn't give a rat's ass what you think. Get out there and start balding.
Ilya is everything to me. He lost his mom to suicide and his first concern when he admits this is that Shane will think negatively of her. Because he loves her and understands her and wants him to too. I donāt think Iāve ever seen a character who lost a parent to suicide have an empathetic perspective of that parent before. They always resent that parent. They always take it as a sign they werenāt āenoughā for their parent. It always becomes a lesson about how the child is the parentās victim. This narrative is always made harsher when the parent was a mother, because mothers are supposed to exist for their children, and live to mother them. Not Ilya. He thinks his mom was funny and beautiful. He thinks his dad was hard on her. He doesnāt want Shane to think she was weak. Iām going sob until I canāt breathe.
I could . not. put. this down for 48 hours - stayed up too late, had weird dreams about it, woke up early, and played it while I was supposed to be doing other things. the last several dozen items took a lot of googling, which I do not even begrudge it.
and then. My partner started it. And the SAME THING happened to him.
surprisingly compelling. start when you have free time. like, yanno, a snow day.
I ripped a ton of CDs I bought at an estate sale using Windows Media Player on Windows 11 back in September, so I wanted to look into this. Turns out Microsoft shut down the server that retrieves music metadata sometime in early December.
Starting yesterday morning (Dec 15 2025), Windows Media Player Legacy cannot find media info for CDs I am ripping. WPM displays unknown alb
Note that it will still play and rip CDs just fine, but they will only show up as "Unknown Album." If you want to rip CDs, you will need third party software. fre:ac has been good in my experience
I also have personally used Foobar2000 since I could interface with my old ipod with it still. It is a bit more techy but worked for what I needed. There are lots of music options out there.
foobar2000
Best Free Audio Players for Windows Frankly speaking, Windows Media Player is a great audio player. It has all the features of a top-notch a
AO3 does not live in āthe cloudā because that is other peopleās computers, and other peopleās computers are vulnerable to censorship.
AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but itās a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going āBadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!ā
When people involved with AO3 talk about āthe cost of serversā they donāt mean āthe cost to pay Amazon for space on their servers.ā They mean, like, the cost to physically own them, and eventually replace them with new ones. And the operating costs to run them.
AO3 is not āin the cloud.ā AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.
While this is not a solution that can work for everyone who wants to deal with controversial content, it is why AO3ple sneer at alt-righters who complain about getting thrown off hosting platforms.
BecauseĀ I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we canāt beĀ TOSedĀ and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other.
Please note that buying new servers and storage just became a shit load more expensive.
Because AI.
To paraphrase a comment on a Gamers Nexus video, the reason computer parts are getting so expensive is that a huge amount of RAM and storage that have not been produced yet were purchased with non-existent money to put in gpus and computers that have also not yet been produced to put in data centers that have not yet been built, to be powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist, to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.
So thatās fun. But it means that already owning computers that actually do the thing is SO MUCH BETTER than hiring other people to build more capacity to buy more computers to do the thing.
How bad is the RAM crisis? The price of ddr3, which is like 10-15yo tech, is going up. The price of DDR5 is now stupid expensive, 4+ times as expensive as it was a few months ago.
Mostly because thereās only one company in the world that is capable of generating the kind of chips needed and everyone uses that company because the modern world is a very precarious house of cards held together by tissue and string and we have a 50 foot toddler playing Godzilla with international trade.
Anyway AO3 is a goddamn miracle people need to respect.
I think this is especially worth pointing out now because if they start fundraising more then this is most probably why they need money. If anyoneās mad that AO3 needs extra dollars then, remember to blame AI.
caption by @/ashleytheebarroness on tiktok: People reach for the Gestapo comparison because it sounds extreme and foreign. It lets white Americans pretend this kind of policing came from somewhere else. But ICE looks closer to slave patrols because that's our history. Local enforcement. Racialized suspicion. Vague authority. Taking people first, justifying it later. Gestapo is a warning. Slave patrols are a mirror.
You know I hadnāt made this exact connection at first but something in my gut told me that people comparing ice to the gestapo didnāt quite feel right. This comparison does fit a lot better.
gummygunk
areudirty
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
2087
prguitarman
yousharknotpass
kianamaiart
snowghoul
romaincrisis
